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This chapter describes possible positions on psychological reality, on linguistic competence, that vary according to whether or not the rules of the language are embodied in the mind; to whether or not some processing rules for language are represented in the mind; and to whether or not some processing rules operate on metalinguistic representations of syntactic and semantic properties of linguistic items. The uncontroversial minimal position — committed only to there being a psychological reality that “respects” the linguistic rules — is the most that can be sustained without some powerful psychological assumption that is independent of anything revealed by the grammar of a language.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 21 March 2019